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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Posted by David at 12:00am

More on the Keyhole platforms

Series: Honorverse

Date: March 17, 2009

I really shouldn't be getting involved with this entire topic.
For that matter, I don't have any business even skimming the Bar at the
moment, with everything that's going on. Nonetheless...

There are two varieties of Keyhole platforms. One of them, the first
developed, is primarily a light-speed communications node and sensor
platform designed to be gotten beyond the interference of the mounting
ship's impeller wedge. It has some limited onboard power storage
capability, and most ships fitted with it carried to a bit, in order to
provide redundancy and also -- for the first time -- to give an
impeller wedge-equipped warship an effective 360 degree coverage area
for both communications and sensors.

Keyhole-Two, on the other hand, is fitted with FTL
telemetry and communications channels. Because the grav-pulse coms are
a heck of a lot bigger than the light-speed coms, the platform had to
get a lot bigger, as well. In addition, its power requirements rose
pretty severely. And whereas the original Keyhole had only extremely
limited anti-missiles self-defense capabilities, Keyhole-Two (in part
because it's so much more valuable) has several point defense clusters
added to the rest of its size and energy budget. As with the original
Keyhole platform, ships equipped with Keyhole-Two are fitted with two
platforms each, once again for combined redundancy and 360 degree
coverage.

By the time you get up to Keyhole-Two sizes,
anything smaller than a capital ship is going to be giving up too much
of its broadside weaponry -- offensive or defensive -- simply to carry
the damned things (which are docked in hull recesses which are
specifically designed and provided for the purpose) when they aren't
deployed.

Keyhole -- and Keyhole-2 -- are both towed
systems, and they are not towed on any physical tether. They are towed
on tractors, and they are primarily powered by transmission from the
mothership. They do have some onboard propulsive capability, using the
same impeller hardware which was developed for the Ghost Rider recon
drones, but that capability is purely secondary. In theory, they could
maintain the station on their onboard drives while remaining in the
basket to be hit by power transmissions from the mothership and to
continue to perform their relay functions. In fact, it's simpler and
less complicated to operate them in what amounts to full-time towed
mode. There are less things to go wrong, and if the ship takes battle
damage sufficient to cut it off from a still functional Keyhole, the
ship in question is probably so far up the creek already that it's not
going to worry about bells and whistles.

Superdreadnoughts and ships-of-the-wall generally can fairly readily be
equipped with multiple Keyhole-One platforms -- that is, the platforms
themselves are small enough, with sufficiently low energy requirements,
but there's no real reason a ship the size of a waller couldn't be
equipped with four or even six of them. Doing that would cut into
volume (and broadside area) available for other purposes, however, and
the RMN more or less decided that giving every ship in a battle
squadron two of them and allowing for weapons to be handed off between
one ship in another provided enough redundancy through simple dispersal
of the system.

One interesting thing the RMN has
observed now that Keyhole-Two has actually been deployed in combat is
that the platforms' "self-defense" capability has proved a very
valuable adjunct to be Navy's starships' antimissile defenses. Indeed,
our good friend Sonja Hemphill is currently tinkering around with a
considerably smaller, simpler platform whose primary function would be missile defense and which could probably be fitted to smaller combatants.

The main limiting factors which have so far restricted Keyhole and
Keyhole-Two to capital ships are (1) the simple physical size of the
platforms; (2) the amount of shipboard power generation and
transmission designed into the system; (3) the fact that the system is
most useful in long-range missile duels and that nothing smaller than a
battle cruiser was likely to be engaging in extremelylong-range combat.
Even the Saganami-C and the Roland are equipped with
only dual-drive missiles, and BuShips and BuWeaps were thinking in
terms of all-up MDMs. Keyhole-Two, in addition, there's no real point
to providing the system to somebody who isn't also capable of firing
the Apollo control missiles. It's entirely possible that a Keyhole-Two
for battlecruisers, possibly with somewhat downsized capabilities, will
eventually be produced for the Agamemnons and their Grayson
and Andermani counterparts, but that's definitely been a secondary or
even tertiary priority in light of other, more immediately critical
demands.

That's probably not everything about the
system, but it's the best I can do without digging out my detailed
technical notes (and spending a lot longer on this than I have any
business doing). I hope it's enough to deal with most of the questions
raised in this thread.